What Enhances Our Freedom: A Lesson with Fulton Sheen

Editor’s Note: This article is part two of a two-part series on Fulton Sheen’s reflections on freedom.

This is a companion piece to a previous article in which I identified Fulton Sheen’s clear and concise teaching on the ways that human persons limit and abuse their freedom. While Sheen never shied away from illuminating the negative cultural trends he saw, the pastor also never wanted to leave his audience with the idea that they were perpetually stuck in the mire of selfishness and sin. He wanted his audience to know authentic hope, and he always attempted to provide practical actions that would enhance freedom, hope, and flourishing.

In 1949 and the early-1950s, Sheen wrote a series of newspaper columns that offered a few foundational habits to enhance human freedom. Specifically, he called his audience to a renewed interior life of reflection and meditation, a deeper and broader expression of gratitude, and service of others. This lesson is still eminently necessary and practical, more than seven decades later, as humans are still prone to using their God-given freedom to end up enslaved.

In one of his very first syndicated columns, entitled simply “Repose,” America’s pastor laid the first most important plank of his platform for counteracting the mass-culture that was robbing humans of their freedom.¹ He identified that Americans are distracted by gadgets and work and conquering the perceived world. They had fallen into the temptation, he stated emphatically, to “waste precious hours away from work in aimless loafing, in negative waiting around for something interesting to come along.”

At this point, Sheen offered an important distinction. “True repose,” he wrote, “is not a mere intermission between the acts of working life. It is an intense activity, but of a different kind.” This allowed him to give more definition to his proposal. He wanted his audience to take time in true leisure, which he defined as “recognition of the spiritual world” and “contemplation of the good.” Real repose, he taught, would allow persons to consider “the small incidents of everyday life in their relation to the larger goodness that surrounds.”

Sheen pointed out the necessity of making repose a life habit. “We cannot get real satisfaction out of our work,” he instructed, “unless we pause, frequently, to ask ourselves why we are doing it, and whether its purpose is one our minds wholeheartedly approve.” In other words, repose allows each of us to understand the purpose and direction of our lives. From that starting point, human persons would be inspired how to act in every setting of their lives.

In his first column in 1952, titled “A Recall to the Inner Life,” Sheen identified that the personal and psychological trend of ignoring true repose was having social and cultural consequences.² During the first half of the twentieth century, he identified, mankind had “lost his inward unity.” Such a loss had led to two world wars and other grave conflicts around the globe. Most significantly, since mankind had forgotten that the solution was first psychological and spiritual, he had become focused on seeking “unity outside himself in the unity of organizations.” Humans formed the League of Nations and United Nations, and they looked to government and social philanthropy to cure the malaise they were witnessing.

As ever, Sheen offered an alternative, with clear and specific instruction. In this time of upheaval, the energies of those who call themselves religious and disciples of Jesus “should be spent recalling man to his spiritual destiny and summoning him to invoke the God Who made him.” This, of course, was to happen specifically through the repose to which Sheen had called Americans previously.

After this important recognition, Sheen offered a basic spiritual habit, a virtue, that would foster a healthy, life-giving freedom in human persons. Using the Gospel episode of Jesus healing ten lepers, the author identified that “thankfulness is rare, ingratitude is common.”³ Indeed, the result in Jesus’ day was identical to the culture of Sheen’s time because of “preoccupation with some selfish interest that outweighed the claims of gratitude.”

This opened the way for Sheen to sketch the better spiritual and moral path. Gratitude is the result, he taught, when persons come to know that they have been blessed beyond what they deserve. “We, too, when we give thanks to God, become better, merely by recognizing that all good things come from Him and are the tokens of His love.” Gratitude was an indicator of a healthy and humble character. And, finally, gratitude was “a means of curing the sick soul.” “Those who suffer from despair,” he wrote, “would do well to sit down and count their blessings.” Putting Sheen’s teaching and direction together, it is clear that he was instructing his audience that gratitude is a first important thought, a first movement toward the Divine Giver, in the necessary moments of repose.

Finally, since we are fleshly beings, Sheen was always keen to recommend some bodily activity to instantiate spiritual disposition. In the same article with which we began these reflections, “How To Be Free,” the philosopher-priest noted that freedom, this deeply spiritual and esoteric concept, “is increased most in service of fellowman.” The mature human person, the grateful human person, “thirsts to use his powers for the betterment of fellowman.”⁴

Thus, we see that Venerable Fulton Sheen’s thought and teaching leads us on a trajectory of freedom and flourishing. That trajectory begins with taking time in repose, examining the purpose of our lives and how the mundane particulars fulfill that purpose. In that recollection, God’s Spirit is given space to move in our hearts, opening up the realization that no person is the cause of his own gifts; that he has been granted those by the Divine, usually through the benevolence of other humans. Finally, in gratitude, we come to know that we can be agents of God’s blessings to others, specifically through the works of mercy, which Jesus taught us as the way of service. During the post-World War II era, the great preacher and teacher echoed the saints down the ages, point out that simple-yet-challenging path for God’s children to find the “glorious freedom” for which they longed (see Rom. 8:21).

Venerable Fulton Sheen, pray for us, that we might use our freedom for the ultimate good!

Photo by Ben Weber on Unsplash

¹Fulton J. Sheen, “Repose,” in The Cincinnati Enquirer (Sunday, November 20, 1949), p. 3.

²Fulton J. Sheen, “A Recall to the Inner Life,” in The Cincinnati Enquirer (Sunday, January 6, 1952), p. 47.

³Fulton J. Sheen, “Ingratitude,” in The Cincinnati Enquirer (Sunday, July 22, 1951), p. 81.

⁴Fulton J. Sheen, “How To Be Free,” in The Cincinnati Enquirer (Sunday, August 24, 1952), p. 54.